Remember October 7th?
None of the luvvies on X who post their hate of Israel and love of Hamas -- the likes of Bernie Sanders, Rashidaa Tlaib, Jeremy Corbyn, Owen Jones -- remember it.
There used to be the (obligatory) throat clearing: “of course what happened on October 7th is horrible. But...”. Now not even that. The luvvies are straight into the attack, on “child killers” from Israel.
There used to be the (obligatory) throat clearing: “of course Israel has the right to exist. But...”. Now not even that. The luvvies quite openly call for the obliteration of Israel, a state established by the United Nations.
Peter Schwartz covers this in a prescient piece ten years ago, "Altruism, the Gaza War and the Law of Causality” [Wayback]:
When someone is killed because, say, a hurricane made his roof cave in, journalists understand the need to explain that occurrence. They don’t simply report that Mr. Jones died when a heavy beam fell on his skull. Rather, they report that a hurricane blew in the roof, thereby making the beam fall. Perhaps they tell us about previous deaths, as well as expected future ones, resulting from the storm. That is, the news reports focus on the primary cause of Mr. Jones’ death.
In reporting on the current Gaza War, however, many journalists have abandoned this logical approach. Instead, they present effects without the real cause. They show the bombed houses and the wounded children, and attribute it all to the most proximate, perceptually observable “cause”: Israeli firepower. What is being ignored, of course, is the primary cause of the carnage: the aggression initiated by Hamas.
When police confront an armed robber and gunfire ensues, the cause is the robber. The existence of a police officer does not cause a need for the existence of criminals. The reverse, though, is true—the existence of criminals gives rise to the need for police. Aggression is the cause, self-defense is the resulting response. The Gaza story, if it were based on the principle of causality, would not be “Gazan Children Are Killed by Israeli Bombs,” but “Deaths of Gazan Children Are Byproducts of Hamas Attacks.” Read on...
